The excited young man plunged into an exposition of the spirit of the new
times. He grew bold and scolded the older men. "You know yourself that
factories are springing up everywhere, in towns all over the State," he
said. "Will Bidwell wake up? Will we have factories here? You know well
enough we won't, and I know why. It's because a man like me who was raised
here has to go to a city to get money to back his plans. If I talked to you
fellows you would laugh at me. In a few years I might make you more money
than you have made in your whole lives, but what's the use talking? I'm
Steve Hunter; you knew me when I was a kid. You'd laugh. What's the use my
trying to tell you fellows my plans?"
Steve turned as though to go out of the room, but Tom Butterworth took hold
of his arm and led him back to a chair. "Now, you tell us what you're up
to," he demanded. In turn he grew indignant. "If you've got something to
manufacture you can get backing here as well as any place," he said. He
became convinced that the jeweler's son was telling the truth. It did not
occur to him that a Bidwell young man would dare lie to such solid men
as John Clark and himself. "You let them city bankers alone," he said
emphatically. "You tell us your story. What you got to tell?"
In the silent little room the three men stared at each other. Tom
Butterworth and John Clark in their turn began to have dreams. They
remembered the tales they had heard of vast fortunes made quickly by men
who owned new and valuable inventions. The land was at that time full of
such tales. They were blown about on every wind. Quickly they realized that
they had made a mistake in their attitude toward Steve, and were anxious to
win his regard. They had called him into the bank to bully him and to laugh
at him. Now they were sorry. As for Steve, he only wanted to get away--to
get by himself and think. An injured look crept over his face. "Well," he
said, "I thought I'd give Bidwell a chance. There are three or four men
here. I have spoken to all of you and dropped a hint of something in the
wind, but I'm not ready to be very definite yet."
Seeing the new look of respect in the eyes of the two men Steve became
bold. "I was going to call a meeting when I was ready," he said pompously.
"You two do what I've been doing. You keep your mouths shut. Don't go near
that telegraph operator and don't talk to a soul. If you mean business I'll
give you a chance to make barrels of money, more'n you ever dreamed of, but
don't be in a hurry." He took a bundle of letters out of his inside coat
pocket, and beat with them on the edge of the table that occupied the
center of the room. Another bold thought came into his mind.
"I've got letters here offering me big money to take my factory either to
Cleveland or Buffalo," he declared emphatically. "It isn't money that's
hard to get. I can tell you men that. What a man wants in his home town is
respect. He don't want to be looked on as a fool because he tries to do
something to rise in the world."
* * * * *
Steve walked boldly out of the bank and into Main Street. When he had got
out of the presence of the two men he was frightened. "Well, I've done it.
I've made a fool of myself," he muttered aloud. In the bank he had said
that Hugh McVey the telegraph operator was his man, that he had brought
the fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In his anxiety to impress
the two older men he had told a story, the falsehood of which could be
discovered in a few minutes. Why had he not kept his dignity and waited?
There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had gone too far, had
been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men not to go near the
telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve to arouse their
suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk the matter over
and start an investigation of their own. Then they would find out he
had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a whispered
conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most shrewd men
he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others. He walked a
little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A shiver ran over
his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the telegraph operator
at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town was full of tales, and
in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact to make an impression;
but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the inventions supposed to
have been worked out by the mysterious stranger from Missouri. There had
after all been nothing but whispered suspicions, old wives' tales, fables
invented by men who had nothing to do but loaf in the drug-store and make
up stories.
The thought that Hugh McVey might not be an inventor overpowered him and he
put it quickly aside. He had something more immediate to think about. The
story of the bluff he had just made in the bank would be found out and the
whole town would rock with laughter at his expense. The young men of the
town did not like him. They would roll the story over on their tongues.
Ribald old fellows who had nothing else to do would take up the story with
joy and would elaborate it. Fellows like the cabbage farmer, Ezra French,
who had a talent for saying cutting things would exercise it. They would
make up imaginary inventions, grotesque, absurd inventions. Then they would
get young fellows to come to him and propose that he take them up, promote
them, and make every one rich. Men would shout jokes at him as he went
along Main Street. His dignity would be gone forever. He would be made a
fool of by the very school boys as he had been in his youth when he bought
the bicycle and rode it about before the eyes of other boys in the
evenings.
Steve hurried out of Main Street and went over the bridge that crossed the
river into Turner's Pike. He did not know what he intended to do, but felt
there was much at stake and that he would have to do something at once.
It was a warm, cloudy day and the road that led to Pickleville was muddy.
During the night before it had rained and more rain was promised. The path
beside the road was slippery, and so absorbed was he that as he plunged
along, his feet slipped out from under him and he sat down in a small pool
of water. A farmer driving past along the road turned to laugh at him. "You
go to hell," Steve shouted. "You just mind your own business and go to
hell."
The distracted young man tried to walk sedately along the path. The long
grass that grew beside the path wet his shoes, and his hands were wet and
muddy. Farmers turned on their wagon seats to stare at him. For some
obscure reason he could not himself understand, he was terribly afraid to
face Hugh McVey. In the bank he had been in the presence of men who were
trying to get the best of him, to make a fool of him, to have fun at his
expense. He had felt that and had resented it. The knowledge had given him
a certain kind of boldness; it had enabled his mind to make up the story
of the inventor secretly employed at his own expense and the city bankers
anxious to furnish him capital. Although he was terribly afraid of
discovery, he felt a little glow of pride at the thought of the boldness
with which he had taken the letters out of his pocket and had challenged
the two men to call his bluff.
Steve, however, felt there was something different about the man in the
telegraph office in Pickleville. He had been in town for nearly two years
and no one knew anything about him. His silence might be indicative of
anything. He was afraid the tall silent Missourian might decide to have
nothing to do with him, and pictured himself as being brushed rudely aside,
being told to mind his own business.
Steve knew instinctively how to handle business men. One simply created the
notion of money to be made without effort. He had done that to the two men
in the bank and it had worked. After all he had succeeded in making them
respect him. He had handled the situation. He wasn't such a fool at that
kind of a thing. The other thing he had to face might be very different.
Perhaps after all Hugh McVey was a big inventor, a man with a powerful
creative mind. It was possible he had been sent to Bidwell by a big
business man of some city. Big business men did strange, mysterious things;
they put wires out in all directions, controlled a thousand little avenues
for the creation of wealth.
Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an
overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of
affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had been
swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is still going
on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness in connection
with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in spite of his own
later success and his own later use of the machinery by which illusion
is created, he never found out that in an industrial world reputations
for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit manufacturer would make
automobiles. He did not know that men are employed to bring up the name
of a politician so that he may be called a statesman, as a new brand of
breakfast food that it may be sold; that most modern great men are mere
illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise
man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men,
will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The
land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals.
One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio,
and a Texas-sized man for Texas.
To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a
notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to try
to imitate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances that sometimes
grow on the side of unhealthy trees, but he did not know it. He did
not know that throughout the country, even in that early day, a system
was being built up to create the myth of greatness. At the seat of the
American Government at Washington, hordes of somewhat clever and altogether
unhealthy young men were already being employed for the purpose. In a
sweeter age many of these young men might have become artists, but they had
not been strong enough to stand against the growing strength of dollars.
They had become instead newspaper correspondents and secretaries to
politicians. All day and every day they used their minds and their talents
as writers in the making of puffs and the creating of myths concerning
the men by whom they were employed. They were like the trained sheep that
are used at great slaughter-houses to lead other sheep into the killing
pens. Having befouled their own minds for hire, they made their living by
befouling the minds of others. Already they had found out that no great
cleverness was required for the work they had to do. What was required was
constant repetition. It was only necessary to say over and over that the
man by whom they were employed was a great man. No proof had to be brought
forward to substantiate the claims they made; no great deeds had to be done
by the men who were thus made great, as brands of crackers or breakfast
food are made salable. Stupid and prolonged and insistent repetition was
what was necessary.
As the politicians of the industrial age have created a myth about
themselves, so also have the owners of dollars, the big bankers, the
railroad manipulators, the promoters of industrial enterprise. The impulse
to do so is partly sprung from shrewdness but for the most part it is due
to a hunger within to be of some real moment in the world. Knowing that
the talent that had made them rich is but a secondary talent, and being
a little worried about the matter, they employ men to glorify it. Having
employed a man for the purpose, they are themselves children enough to
believe the myth they have paid money to have created. Every rich man in
the country unconsciously hates his press agent.
Although he had never read a book, Steve was a constant reader of the
newspapers and had been deeply impressed by the stories he had read
regarding the shrewdness and ability of the American captains of industry.
To him they were supermen and he would have crawled on his knees before
a Gould or a Cal Price--the commanding figures among moneyed men of that
day. As he went down along Turner's Pike that day when industry was born in
Bidwell, he thought of these men and of lesser rich men of Cleveland and
Buffalo, and was afraid that in approaching Hugh he might be coming into
competition with one of these men. As he hurried along under the gray
sky, he however realized that the time for action had come and that he
must at once put the plans that he had formed in his mind to the test of
practicability; that he must at once see Hugh McVey, find out if he really
did have an invention that could be manufactured, and if he did try to
secure some kind of rights of ownership over it. "If I do not act at once,
either Tom Butterworth or John Clark will get in ahead of me," he thought.
He knew they were both shrewd capable men. Had they not become well-to-do?
Even during the talk in the bank, when they had seemed to be impressed by
his words, they might well have been making plans to get the better of him.
They would act, but he must act first.
Steve hadn't the courage of the lie he had told. He did not have
imagination enough to understand how powerful a thing is a lie. He walked
quickly along until he came to the Wheeling Station at Pickleville, and
then, not having the courage to confront Hugh at once, went past the
station and crept in behind the deserted pickle factory that stood across
the tracks. Through a broken window at the back he climbed, and crept like
a thief across the earth floor until he came to a window that looked out
upon the station. A freight train rumbled slowly past and a farmer came to
the station to get a load of goods that had arrived by freight. George Pike
came running from his house to attend to the wants of the farmer. He went
back to his house and Steve was left alone in the presence of the man on
whom he felt all of his future depended. He was as excited as a village
girl in the presence of a lover. Through the windows of the telegraph
office he could see Hugh seated at a desk with a book before him. The
presence of the book frightened him. He decided that the mysterious
Missourian must be some strange sort of intellectual giant. He was sure
that one who could sit quietly reading hour after hour in such a lonely
isolated place could be of no ordinary clay. As he stood in the deep
shadows inside the old building and stared at the man he was trying to find
courage to approach, a citizen of Bidwell named Dick Spearsman came to the
station and going inside, talked to the telegraph operator. Steve trembled
with anxiety. The man who had come to the station was an insurance agent
who also owned a small berry farm at the edge of town. He had a son who had
gone west to take up land in the state of Kansas, and the father thought of
visiting him. He came to the station to make inquiry regarding the railroad
fare, but when Steve saw him talking to Hugh, the thought came into his
mind that John Clark or Thomas Butterworth might have sent him to the
station to make an investigation of the truth of the statements he had made
in the bank. "It would be like them to do it that way," he muttered to
himself. "They wouldn't come themselves. They would send some one they
thought I wouldn't suspect. They would play safe, damn 'em."
Trembling with fear, Steve walked up and down in the empty factory. Cobwebs
hanging down brushed against his face and he jumped aside as though a hand
had reached out of the darkness to touch him. In the corners of the old
building shadows lurked and distorted thoughts began to come into his head.
He rolled and lighted a cigarette and then remembered that the flare of the
match could probably be seen from the station. He cursed himself for his
carelessness. Throwing the cigarette on the earth floor he ground it under
his heel. When at last Dick Spearsman had disappeared up the road that led
to Bidwell and he came out of the old factory and got again into Turner's
Pike, he felt that he was in no shape to talk of business but nevertheless
must act at once. In front of the factory he stopped in the road and tried
to wipe the mud off the seat of his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he
went to the creek and washed his soiled hands. With wet hands he arranged
his tie and straightened the collar of his coat. He had an air of one
about to ask a woman to become his wife. Striving to look as important and
dignified as possible, he went along the station platform and into the
telegraph office to confront Hugh and to find out at once and finally what
fate the gods had in store for him.
* * * * *
It no doubt contributed to Steve's happiness in after life, in the days
when he was growing rich, and later when he reached out for public honors,
contributed to campaign funds, and even in secret dreamed of getting into
the United States Senate or being Governor of his state, that he never knew
how badly he overreached himself that day in his youth when he made his
first business deal with Hugh at the Wheeling Station at Pickleville. Later
Hugh's interest in the Steven Hunter industrial enterprises was taken care
of by a man who was as shrewd as Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had
made money and knew how to make and handle money, managed such things for
the inventor, and Steve's chance was gone forever.
That is, however, a part of the story of the development of the town of
Bidwell and a story that Steve never understood. When he overreached
himself that day he did not know what he had done. He made a deal with Hugh
and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he had got himself into
when he talked too much to the two men in the bank.
Although Steve's father had always a great faith in his son's shrewdness
and when he talked to other men represented him as a peculiarly capable and
unappreciated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the Hunter
household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's mother had died
when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years older than himself,
kept herself always in the house and seldom appeared on the streets. She
was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had twisted her body out
of shape, and her face twitched incessantly. One morning in the barn back
of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of fourteen, was oiling his bicycle
when his sister appeared and stood watching him. A small wrench lay on the
ground and she picked it up. Suddenly and without warning she began to beat
him on the head. He was compelled to knock her down in order to tear the
wrench out of her hand. After the incident she was ill in bed for a month.
Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he began
to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected by his
fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and among other
things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had good blood in
his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his ancestry, and with the
exception of his immediate family it seemed very satisfactory. The sister,
with her twisted body and her face that twitched so persistently, seemed
to be everlastingly sneering at him. He grew half afraid to come into her
presence. After he began to grow rich he married Ernestine, the daughter of
the soap maker at Buffalo, and when her father died she also had a great
deal of money. His own father died and he set up a household of his own.
That was in the time when big houses began to appear at the edge of the
berry lands and on the hills south of Bidwell. On his father's death Steve
became guardian for his sister. The jeweler had left a small estate and it
was entirely in the son's hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small
house in town and was put in the position of being entirely dependent on
her brother's bounty. In a sense it might be said that she lived by her
hatred of him. When on rare occasions he came to her house she would not
see him. A servant came to the door and reported her asleep. Almost every
month she wrote a letter demanding that her share of her father's money
be handed over to her, but it did no good. Steve occasionally spoke to an
acquaintance of his difficulty with her. "I am more sorry for the woman
than I can say," he declared. "It's the dream of my life to make the poor
afflicted soul happy. You see yourself that I provide her with every
comfort of life. Ours is an old family. I have it from an expert in such
matters that we are descendants of one Hunter, a courtier in the court of
Edward the Second of England. Our blood has perhaps become a little thin.
All the vitality of the family was centered in me. My sister does not
understand me and that has been the cause of much unhappiness and heart
burning, but I shall always do my duty by her."
In the late afternoon of the spring day that was also the most eventful day
of his life, Steve went quickly along the Wheeling Station platform to the
door of the telegraph office. It was a public place, but before going in
he stopped, again straightened his tie and brushed his clothes, and then
knocked at the door. As there was no response he opened the door softly
and looked in. Hugh was at his desk but did not look up. Steve went in and
closed the door. By chance the moment of his entrance was also a big moment
in the life of the man he had come to see. The mind of the young inventor,
that had for so long been dreamy and uncertain, had suddenly become
extraordinarily clear and free. One of the inspired moments that come to
intense natures, working intensely, had come to him. The mechanical problem
he was trying so hard to work out became clear. It was one of the moments
that Hugh afterwards thought of as justifying his existence, and in later
life he came to live for such moments. With a nod of his head to Steve he
arose and hurried out to the building that was used by the Wheeling as
a freight warehouse. The jeweler's son ran at his heels. On an elevated
platform before the freight warehouse sat an odd looking agricultural
implement, a machine for rooting potatoes out of the ground that had been
received on the day before and was now awaiting delivery to some farmer.
Hugh dropped to his knees beside the machine and examined it closely.
Muttered exclamations broke from his lips. For the first time in his life
he was not embarrassed in the presence of another person. The two men,
the one almost grotesquely tall, the other short of stature and already
inclined toward corpulency, stared at each other. "What is it you're
inventing? I came to see you about that," Steve said timidly.
Hugh did not answer the question directly. He stepped across the narrow
platform to the freight warehouse and began to make a rude drawing on the
side of the building. Then he tried to explain his plant-setting machine.
He spoke of it as a thing already achieved. At the moment he thought of it
in that way. "I had not thought of the use of a large wheel with the arms
attached at regular intervals," he said absent-mindedly. "I will have to
find money now. That'll be the next step. It will be necessary to make a
working model of the machine now. I must find out what changes I'll have to
make in my calculations."
The two men returned to the telegraph office and while Hugh listened Steve
made his proposal. Even then he did not understand what the machine that
was to be made was to do. It was enough for him that a machine was to be
made and he wanted to share in its ownership at once. As the two men walked
back from the freight warehouse, his mind took hold of Hugh's remark about
getting money. Again he was afraid. "There's some one in the background,"
he thought. "Now I must make a proposal he can't refuse. I mustn't leave
until I've made a deal with him."
Fairly carried away by his anxiety, Steve proposed to provide money out of
his own pocket to make the model of the machine. "We'll rent the old pickle
factory across the track," he said, opening the door and pointing with a
trembling finger. "I can get it cheap. I'll have windows and a floor put
in. Then I'll get you a man to whittle out a model of the machine. Allie
Mulberry can do it. I'll get him for you. He can whittle anything if you
only show him what you want. He's half crazy and won't get on to our
secret. When the model is made, leave it to me, you just leave it to me."
Rubbing his hands together Steve walked boldly to The telegrapher's desk
and picking up a sheet of paper began to write out a contract. It provided
that Hugh Was to get a royalty of ten per cent. of the selling price on the
machine he had invented and that was to be manufactured by a company to
be organized by Steven Hunter. The contract also stated that a promoting
company was to be organized at once and money provided for the experimental
work Hugh had yet to do. The Missourian was to begin getting a salary at
once. He was to risk nothing, as Steve elaborately explained. When he was
ready for them mechanics were to be employed and their salaries paid. When
the contract had been written and read aloud, a copy was made and Hugh, who
was again embarrassed beyond words, signed his name.
With a flourish of his hand Steve laid a little pile of money on the desk.
"That's for a starter," he said and turned to frown at George Pike who at
that moment came to the door. The freight agent went quickly away and the
two men were left alone together. Steve shook hands with his new partner.
He went out and then came in again. "You understand," he said mysteriously.
"The fifty dollars is your first month's salary. I was ready for you. I
brought it along. You just leave everything to me, just you leave it to
me." Again he went out and Hugh was left alone. He saw the young man go
across the tracks to the old factory and walk up and down before it. When a
farmer came along and shouted at him, he did not reply, but stepping back
into the road swept the deserted old building with his eyes as a general
might have looked over a battlefield. Then he went briskly down the road
toward town and the farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare after him.
Hugh McVey also stared. When Steve had gone away, he walked to the end
of the station platform and looked along the road toward town. It seemed
to him wonderful that he had at last held conversation with a citizen
of Bidwell. A little of the import of the contract he had signed came to
him, and he went into the station and got his copy of it and put it in his
pocket. Then he came out again. When he read it over and realized anew that
he was to be paid a living wage and have time and help to work out the
problem that had now become vastly important to his happiness, it seemed
to him that he had been in the presence of a kind of god. He remembered
the words of Sarah Shepard concerning the bright alert citizens of eastern
towns and realized that he had been in the presence of such a being, that
he had in some way become connected in his new work with such a one. The
realization overcame him completely. Forgetting entirely his duties as a
telegrapher, he closed the office and went for a walk across the meadows
and in the little patches of woodlands that still remained standing in the
open plain north of Pickleville. He did not return until late at night, and
when he did, had not solved the puzzle as to what had happened. All he got
out of it was the fact that the machine he had been trying to make was of
great and mysterious importance to the civilization into which he had come
to live and of which he wanted so keenly to be a part. There seemed to him
something almost sacred in that fact. A new determination to complete and
perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him.
* * * * *
The meeting to organize a promotion company that would in turn launch the
first industrial enterprise in the town of Bidwell was held in the back
room of the Bidwell bank one afternoon in June. The berry season had just
come to an end and the streets were full of people. A circus had come to
town and at one o'clock there was a parade. Before the stores horses
belonging to visiting country people stood hitched in two long rows. The
meeting in the bank was not held until four o'clock, when the banking
business was at an end for the day. It had been a hot, stuffy afternoon
and a storm threatened. For some reason the whole town had an inkling of
the fact that a meeting was to be held on that day, and in spite of the
excitement caused by the coming of the circus, it was in everybody's mind.
From the very beginning of his upward journey in life, Steve Hunter had
the faculty of throwing an air of mystery and importance about everything
he did. Every one saw the workings of the machinery by which the myth
concerning himself was created, but was nevertheless impressed. Even the
men of Bidwell who retained the ability to laugh at Steve could not laugh
at the things he did.
For two months before the day on which the meeting was held, the town had
been on edge. Every one knew that Hugh McVey had suddenly given up his
place in the telegraph office and that he was engaged in some enterprise
with Steve Hunter. "Well, I see he has thrown off the mask, that fellow,"
said Alban Foster, superintendent of the Bidwell schools, in speaking of
the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, the minister of the Baptist
Church.
Steve saw to it that although every one was curious the curiosity was
unsatisfied. Even his father was left in the dark. The two men had a sharp
quarrel about the matter, but as Steve had three thousand dollars of his
own, left him by his mother, and was well past his twenty-first year, there
was nothing his father could do.
At Pickleville the windows and doors at the back of the deserted factory
were bricked up, and over the windows and the door at the front, where a
floor had been laid, iron bars specially made by Lew Twining the Bidwell
blacksmith had been put. The bars over the door locked the place at night
and gave the factory the air of a prison. Every evening before he went to
bed Steve walked to Pickleville. The sinister appearance of the building
at night gave him a peculiar satisfaction. "They'll find out what I'm up
to when I want 'em to," he said to himself. Allie Mulberry worked at the
factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction he whittled pieces of wood
into various shapes, but had no idea of what he was doing. No one but the
half-wit and Steve Hunter were admitted to the society of the telegraph
operator. When Allie Mulberry came into the Main Street at night, every
one stopped him and a thousand questions were asked, but he only shook his
head and smiled foolishly. On Sunday afternoons crowds of men and women
walked down Turner's Pike to Pickleville and stood looking at the deserted
building, but no one tried to enter. The bars were in place and window
shades were drawn over the windows. Above the door that faced the road
there was a large sign. "Keep Out. This Means You," the sign said.
The four men who met Steve in the bank knew vaguely that some sort of
invention was being perfected, but did not know what it was. They spoke
in an offhand way of the matter to their friends and that increased the
general curiosity. Every one tried to guess what was up. When Steve was not
about, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything but
gave the impression of men sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve told them
nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. "The young upstart, I believe yet
he's a bluff," the banker declared to his friend, Tom Butterworth.
On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores in
the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air of
importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young upstart
and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with Hugh McVey,
something of conviction went out of their voices. "I read in the paper that
a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an invention. He got it
up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's a new kind of way for
sealing fruit cans," a man in the crowd before Birdie Spink's drug store
absent-mindedly observed.
Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked persistently
of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those who listened a
sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of the new day. One
evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was assembled, Steve
Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became silent. Birdie Spinks
was for some mysterious reason a little upset. In the store something
happened that, had there been some one there to record it, might later have
been remembered as the moment that marked the coming of the new age to
Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed out the cigar, looked at the
young man whose name had so suddenly come upon every one's lips and whom he
had known from babyhood, and then addressed him as no young man of his age
had ever before been addressed by an older citizen of the town. "Well, good
evening, Mr. Hunter," he said respectfully. "And how do you find yourself
this evening?"
To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting
machine and the work it was intended to do. "It's the most perfect thing
of its kind I've ever seen," he said with the air of one who has spent
his life as an expert examiner of machinery. Then, to the amazement of
every one, he produced sheets covered with figures estimating the cost
of manufacturing the machine. To the men present it seemed as though the
question as to the practicability of the machine had already been settled.
The sheets covered with figures made the actual beginning of manufacturing
seem near at hand. Without raising his voice and quite as a matter of
course, Steve proposed that the men present subscribe each three thousand
dollars to the stock of a promotion company, the money to be used to
perfect the machine and put it actually to work in the fields, while a
larger company for the building of a factory was being organized. For the
three thousand dollars each of the men would receive later six thousand
dollars in stock in the larger company. They would make one hundred per
cent. on their first investment. As for himself he owned the invention and
it was very valuable. He had already received many offers from other men
in other places. He wanted to stick to his own town and to the men who had
known him since he was a boy. He would retain a controlling interest in the
larger company and that would enable him to take care of his friends. John
Clark he proposed to make treasurer of the promotion company. Every one
could see he would be the right man. Gordon Hart should be manager. Tom
Butterworth could, if he could find time to give it, help him in the actual
organization of the larger company. He did not propose to do anything in
a small way. Much stock would have to be sold to farmers, as well as to
townspeople, and he could see no reason why a certain commission for the
selling of stock should not be paid.
The four men came out of the back room of the bank just as the storm that
had all day been threatening broke on Main Street. They stood together by
the front window and watched the people skurry along past the stores
homeward-bound from the circus. Farmers jumping into their wagons started
their horses away on the trot. The whole street was populous with people
shouting and running. To an observing person standing at the bank window,
Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer a quiet town filled with people
who lived quiet lives and thought quiet thoughts, but a tiny section of
some giant modern city. The sky was extraordinarily black as from the smoke
of a mill. The hurrying people might have been workmen escaping from the
mill at the end of the day. Clouds of dust swept through the street. Steve
Hunter's imagination was aroused. For some reason the black clouds of dust
and the running people gave him a tremendous sense of power. It almost
seemed to him that he had filled the sky with clouds and that something
latent in him had startled the people. He was anxious to get away from
the men who had just agreed to join him in his first great industrial
adventure. He felt that they were after all mere puppets, creatures he
could use, men who were being swept along by him as the people running
along the streets were being swept along by the storm. He and the storm
were in a way akin to each other. He had an impulse to be alone with the
storm, to walk dignified and upright in the face of it as he felt that in
the future he would walk dignified and upright in the face of men.
Steve went out of the bank and into the street. The men inside shouted
at him, telling him he would get wet, but he paid no attention to their
warning. When he had gone and when his father had run quickly across the
street to his jewelry store, the three men who were left in the bank
looked at each other and laughed. Like the loiterers before Birdie Spinks'
drug-store, they wanted to belittle him and had an inclination to begin
calling him names; but for some reason they could not do it. Something had
happened to them. They looked at each other with a question in their eyes.
Each man waited for the others to speak. "Well, whatever happens we can't
lose much of anything," John Clark finally observed.
And over the bridge and out into Turner's Pike walked Steve Hunter, the
embryo industrial magnate. Across the great stretches of fields that lay
beside the road the wind ran furiously, tearing leaves off trees, carrying
great volumes of dust before it. The hurrying black clouds in the sky were,
he fancied, like clouds of smoke pouring out of the chimneys of factories
owned by himself. In fancy also he saw his town become a city, bathed in
the smoke of his enterprises. As he looked abroad over the fields swept by
the storm of wind, he realized that the road along which he walked would in
time become a city street. "Pretty soon I'll get an option on this land,"
he said meditatively. An exalted mood took possession of him and when
he got to Pickleville he did not go into the shop where Hugh and Allie
Mulberry were at work, but turning, walked back toward town in the mud and
the driving rain.
It was a time when Steve wanted to be by himself, to feel himself the one
great man of the community. He had intended to go into the old pickle
factory and escape the rain, but when he got to the railroad tracks, had
turned back because he realized suddenly that in the presence of the
silent, intent inventor he had never been able to feel big. He wanted to
feel big on that evening and so, unmindful of the rain and of his hat,
that was caught up by the wind and blown away into a field, he went along
the deserted road thinking great thoughts. At a place where there were no
houses he stopped for a moment and lifted his tiny hands to the skies. "I'm
a man. I tell you what, I'm a man. Whatever any one says, I tell you what,
I'm a man," he shouted into the void.
CHAPTER VII
Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have
come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They
live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates,
and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant
toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls the mice scamper about
in droves, and there is much squealing and chattering. Now and then a bold
mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he
will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built
the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall
live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one
shall go hungry."
The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses,
squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and
depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields,
but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in
droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness
of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. When the children
fight and scream in the houses and in the streets, the dark spaces between
the walls rumble with strange and appalling noises.
The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment
escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light comes
into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up stories
about them. "The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of days over
the tops of trees," he says and looks quickly about to see if he has been
heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he runs away with
a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other mice are repeating
his saying and getting some little comfort from it, he and the female mouse
find a warm dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that
mice continue to be born to dwell within the walls of the houses.
When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had been
whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship,
floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying in the
window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of the new
specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions at a bench
in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a strange dog that
has at last found a master. He paid no attention to Steve Hunter who, with
the air of one bearing in his breast some gigantic secret, came in and
went out at the door twenty times a day, but kept his eyes on the silent
Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings on sheets of paper. Allie tried
valiantly to follow the instructions given him and to understand what his
master was trying to do, and Hugh, finding himself unembarrassed by the
presence of the half-wit, sometimes spent hours trying to explain the
workings of some intricate part of the proposed machine. Hugh made each
part crudely out of great pieces of board and Allie reproduced the part in
miniature. Intelligence began to come into the eyes of the man who all his
life had whittled meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach
stones, and ships intended to float in bottles. Love and understanding
began a little to do for him what words could not have done. One day when a
part Hugh had fashioned would not work the half-wit himself made the model
of a part that worked perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine,
he was so happy that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing
with delight.
When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of
excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared himself
either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties
were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of the invention, and
in the nature of things could not have, were ready to fight any one who
dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who drove into town to see
the new wonder were many who said the machine would not, could not, work.
"It isn't practical," they said. Going off by themselves and forming
groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred objections sprang to their lips.
"See all the little wheels and cogs the thing has," they said. "You see
it won't work. You take now in a field where there are stones and old
tree roots, maybe, sticking in the ground. There you'll see. Fools'll buy
the machine, yes. They'll spend their money. They'll put in plants. The
plants'll die. The money'll be wasted. There'll be no crop." Old men, who
had been cabbage farmers in the country north of Bidwell all their lives,
and whose bodies were all twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of
the cabbage fields, came hobbling into town to look at the model of the
new machine. Their opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the
carpenter, the artisan, the doctor--by all the townspeople. Almost without
exception, they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before
the jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the
crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. "Huh," they
exclaimed, "a thing of wheels and cogs, eh? Well, so young Hunter expects
that thing to take the place of a man. He's a fool. I always said that boy
was a fool." The merchants and townspeople, their ardor a little dampened
by the adverse decision of the men who knew plant-setting, went off by
themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks' drugstore, but did not listen
to the talk of Judge Hanby. "If the machine works, the town'll wake up,"
some one declared. "It means factories, new people coming in, houses to
be built, goods to be bought." Visions of suddenly acquired wealth began
to float in their minds. Young Ed Hall, apprentice to Ben Peeler the
carpenter, grew angry. "Hell," he exclaimed, "why listen to a lot of damned
old calamity howlers? It's the town's duty to get out and plug for that
machine. We got to wake up here. We got to forget what we used to think
about Steve Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? and he took it.
I wish I was him. I only wish I was him. And what about that fellow we
thought was maybe just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all slick, now
didn't he? I tell you we ought to be proud to have such men as him and
times. He grew bold and scolded the older men. "You know yourself that
factories are springing up everywhere, in towns all over the State," he
said. "Will Bidwell wake up? Will we have factories here? You know well
enough we won't, and I know why. It's because a man like me who was raised
here has to go to a city to get money to back his plans. If I talked to you
fellows you would laugh at me. In a few years I might make you more money
than you have made in your whole lives, but what's the use talking? I'm
Steve Hunter; you knew me when I was a kid. You'd laugh. What's the use my
trying to tell you fellows my plans?"
Steve turned as though to go out of the room, but Tom Butterworth took hold
of his arm and led him back to a chair. "Now, you tell us what you're up
to," he demanded. In turn he grew indignant. "If you've got something to
manufacture you can get backing here as well as any place," he said. He
became convinced that the jeweler's son was telling the truth. It did not
occur to him that a Bidwell young man would dare lie to such solid men
as John Clark and himself. "You let them city bankers alone," he said
emphatically. "You tell us your story. What you got to tell?"
In the silent little room the three men stared at each other. Tom
Butterworth and John Clark in their turn began to have dreams. They
remembered the tales they had heard of vast fortunes made quickly by men
who owned new and valuable inventions. The land was at that time full of
such tales. They were blown about on every wind. Quickly they realized that
they had made a mistake in their attitude toward Steve, and were anxious to
win his regard. They had called him into the bank to bully him and to laugh
at him. Now they were sorry. As for Steve, he only wanted to get away--to
get by himself and think. An injured look crept over his face. "Well," he
said, "I thought I'd give Bidwell a chance. There are three or four men
here. I have spoken to all of you and dropped a hint of something in the
wind, but I'm not ready to be very definite yet."
Seeing the new look of respect in the eyes of the two men Steve became
bold. "I was going to call a meeting when I was ready," he said pompously.
"You two do what I've been doing. You keep your mouths shut. Don't go near
that telegraph operator and don't talk to a soul. If you mean business I'll
give you a chance to make barrels of money, more'n you ever dreamed of, but
don't be in a hurry." He took a bundle of letters out of his inside coat
pocket, and beat with them on the edge of the table that occupied the
center of the room. Another bold thought came into his mind.
"I've got letters here offering me big money to take my factory either to
Cleveland or Buffalo," he declared emphatically. "It isn't money that's
hard to get. I can tell you men that. What a man wants in his home town is
respect. He don't want to be looked on as a fool because he tries to do
something to rise in the world."
* * * * *
Steve walked boldly out of the bank and into Main Street. When he had got
out of the presence of the two men he was frightened. "Well, I've done it.
I've made a fool of myself," he muttered aloud. In the bank he had said
that Hugh McVey the telegraph operator was his man, that he had brought
the fellow to Bidwell. What a fool he had been. In his anxiety to impress
the two older men he had told a story, the falsehood of which could be
discovered in a few minutes. Why had he not kept his dignity and waited?
There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had gone too far, had
been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men not to go near the
telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve to arouse their
suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk the matter over
and start an investigation of their own. Then they would find out he
had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a whispered
conversation regarding the probability of his tale. Like most shrewd men
he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others. He walked a
little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A shiver ran over
his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the telegraph operator
at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town was full of tales, and
in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact to make an impression;
but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the inventions supposed to
have been worked out by the mysterious stranger from Missouri. There had
after all been nothing but whispered suspicions, old wives' tales, fables
invented by men who had nothing to do but loaf in the drug-store and make
up stories.
The thought that Hugh McVey might not be an inventor overpowered him and he
put it quickly aside. He had something more immediate to think about. The
story of the bluff he had just made in the bank would be found out and the
whole town would rock with laughter at his expense. The young men of the
town did not like him. They would roll the story over on their tongues.
Ribald old fellows who had nothing else to do would take up the story with
joy and would elaborate it. Fellows like the cabbage farmer, Ezra French,
who had a talent for saying cutting things would exercise it. They would
make up imaginary inventions, grotesque, absurd inventions. Then they would
get young fellows to come to him and propose that he take them up, promote
them, and make every one rich. Men would shout jokes at him as he went
along Main Street. His dignity would be gone forever. He would be made a
fool of by the very school boys as he had been in his youth when he bought
the bicycle and rode it about before the eyes of other boys in the
evenings.
Steve hurried out of Main Street and went over the bridge that crossed the
river into Turner's Pike. He did not know what he intended to do, but felt
there was much at stake and that he would have to do something at once.
It was a warm, cloudy day and the road that led to Pickleville was muddy.
During the night before it had rained and more rain was promised. The path
beside the road was slippery, and so absorbed was he that as he plunged
along, his feet slipped out from under him and he sat down in a small pool
of water. A farmer driving past along the road turned to laugh at him. "You
go to hell," Steve shouted. "You just mind your own business and go to
hell."
The distracted young man tried to walk sedately along the path. The long
grass that grew beside the path wet his shoes, and his hands were wet and
muddy. Farmers turned on their wagon seats to stare at him. For some
obscure reason he could not himself understand, he was terribly afraid to
face Hugh McVey. In the bank he had been in the presence of men who were
trying to get the best of him, to make a fool of him, to have fun at his
expense. He had felt that and had resented it. The knowledge had given him
a certain kind of boldness; it had enabled his mind to make up the story
of the inventor secretly employed at his own expense and the city bankers
anxious to furnish him capital. Although he was terribly afraid of
discovery, he felt a little glow of pride at the thought of the boldness
with which he had taken the letters out of his pocket and had challenged
the two men to call his bluff.
Steve, however, felt there was something different about the man in the
telegraph office in Pickleville. He had been in town for nearly two years
and no one knew anything about him. His silence might be indicative of
anything. He was afraid the tall silent Missourian might decide to have
nothing to do with him, and pictured himself as being brushed rudely aside,
being told to mind his own business.
Steve knew instinctively how to handle business men. One simply created the
notion of money to be made without effort. He had done that to the two men
in the bank and it had worked. After all he had succeeded in making them
respect him. He had handled the situation. He wasn't such a fool at that
kind of a thing. The other thing he had to face might be very different.
Perhaps after all Hugh McVey was a big inventor, a man with a powerful
creative mind. It was possible he had been sent to Bidwell by a big
business man of some city. Big business men did strange, mysterious things;
they put wires out in all directions, controlled a thousand little avenues
for the creation of wealth.
Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an
overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of
affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had been
swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is still going
on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness in connection
with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in spite of his own
later success and his own later use of the machinery by which illusion
is created, he never found out that in an industrial world reputations
for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit manufacturer would make
automobiles. He did not know that men are employed to bring up the name
of a politician so that he may be called a statesman, as a new brand of
breakfast food that it may be sold; that most modern great men are mere
illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise
man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men,
will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The
land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals.
One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio,
and a Texas-sized man for Texas.
To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a
notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to try
to imitate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances that sometimes
grow on the side of unhealthy trees, but he did not know it. He did
not know that throughout the country, even in that early day, a system
was being built up to create the myth of greatness. At the seat of the
American Government at Washington, hordes of somewhat clever and altogether
unhealthy young men were already being employed for the purpose. In a
sweeter age many of these young men might have become artists, but they had
not been strong enough to stand against the growing strength of dollars.
They had become instead newspaper correspondents and secretaries to
politicians. All day and every day they used their minds and their talents
as writers in the making of puffs and the creating of myths concerning
the men by whom they were employed. They were like the trained sheep that
are used at great slaughter-houses to lead other sheep into the killing
pens. Having befouled their own minds for hire, they made their living by
befouling the minds of others. Already they had found out that no great
cleverness was required for the work they had to do. What was required was
constant repetition. It was only necessary to say over and over that the
man by whom they were employed was a great man. No proof had to be brought
forward to substantiate the claims they made; no great deeds had to be done
by the men who were thus made great, as brands of crackers or breakfast
food are made salable. Stupid and prolonged and insistent repetition was
what was necessary.
As the politicians of the industrial age have created a myth about
themselves, so also have the owners of dollars, the big bankers, the
railroad manipulators, the promoters of industrial enterprise. The impulse
to do so is partly sprung from shrewdness but for the most part it is due
to a hunger within to be of some real moment in the world. Knowing that
the talent that had made them rich is but a secondary talent, and being
a little worried about the matter, they employ men to glorify it. Having
employed a man for the purpose, they are themselves children enough to
believe the myth they have paid money to have created. Every rich man in
the country unconsciously hates his press agent.
Although he had never read a book, Steve was a constant reader of the
newspapers and had been deeply impressed by the stories he had read
regarding the shrewdness and ability of the American captains of industry.
To him they were supermen and he would have crawled on his knees before
a Gould or a Cal Price--the commanding figures among moneyed men of that
day. As he went down along Turner's Pike that day when industry was born in
Bidwell, he thought of these men and of lesser rich men of Cleveland and
Buffalo, and was afraid that in approaching Hugh he might be coming into
competition with one of these men. As he hurried along under the gray
sky, he however realized that the time for action had come and that he
must at once put the plans that he had formed in his mind to the test of
practicability; that he must at once see Hugh McVey, find out if he really
did have an invention that could be manufactured, and if he did try to
secure some kind of rights of ownership over it. "If I do not act at once,
either Tom Butterworth or John Clark will get in ahead of me," he thought.
He knew they were both shrewd capable men. Had they not become well-to-do?
Even during the talk in the bank, when they had seemed to be impressed by
his words, they might well have been making plans to get the better of him.
They would act, but he must act first.
Steve hadn't the courage of the lie he had told. He did not have
imagination enough to understand how powerful a thing is a lie. He walked
quickly along until he came to the Wheeling Station at Pickleville, and
then, not having the courage to confront Hugh at once, went past the
station and crept in behind the deserted pickle factory that stood across
the tracks. Through a broken window at the back he climbed, and crept like
a thief across the earth floor until he came to a window that looked out
upon the station. A freight train rumbled slowly past and a farmer came to
the station to get a load of goods that had arrived by freight. George Pike
came running from his house to attend to the wants of the farmer. He went
back to his house and Steve was left alone in the presence of the man on
whom he felt all of his future depended. He was as excited as a village
girl in the presence of a lover. Through the windows of the telegraph
office he could see Hugh seated at a desk with a book before him. The
presence of the book frightened him. He decided that the mysterious
Missourian must be some strange sort of intellectual giant. He was sure
that one who could sit quietly reading hour after hour in such a lonely
isolated place could be of no ordinary clay. As he stood in the deep
shadows inside the old building and stared at the man he was trying to find
courage to approach, a citizen of Bidwell named Dick Spearsman came to the
station and going inside, talked to the telegraph operator. Steve trembled
with anxiety. The man who had come to the station was an insurance agent
who also owned a small berry farm at the edge of town. He had a son who had
gone west to take up land in the state of Kansas, and the father thought of
visiting him. He came to the station to make inquiry regarding the railroad
fare, but when Steve saw him talking to Hugh, the thought came into his
mind that John Clark or Thomas Butterworth might have sent him to the
station to make an investigation of the truth of the statements he had made
in the bank. "It would be like them to do it that way," he muttered to
himself. "They wouldn't come themselves. They would send some one they
thought I wouldn't suspect. They would play safe, damn 'em."
Trembling with fear, Steve walked up and down in the empty factory. Cobwebs
hanging down brushed against his face and he jumped aside as though a hand
had reached out of the darkness to touch him. In the corners of the old
building shadows lurked and distorted thoughts began to come into his head.
He rolled and lighted a cigarette and then remembered that the flare of the
match could probably be seen from the station. He cursed himself for his
carelessness. Throwing the cigarette on the earth floor he ground it under
his heel. When at last Dick Spearsman had disappeared up the road that led
to Bidwell and he came out of the old factory and got again into Turner's
Pike, he felt that he was in no shape to talk of business but nevertheless
must act at once. In front of the factory he stopped in the road and tried
to wipe the mud off the seat of his trousers with a handkerchief. Then he
went to the creek and washed his soiled hands. With wet hands he arranged
his tie and straightened the collar of his coat. He had an air of one
about to ask a woman to become his wife. Striving to look as important and
dignified as possible, he went along the station platform and into the
telegraph office to confront Hugh and to find out at once and finally what
fate the gods had in store for him.
* * * * *
It no doubt contributed to Steve's happiness in after life, in the days
when he was growing rich, and later when he reached out for public honors,
contributed to campaign funds, and even in secret dreamed of getting into
the United States Senate or being Governor of his state, that he never knew
how badly he overreached himself that day in his youth when he made his
first business deal with Hugh at the Wheeling Station at Pickleville. Later
Hugh's interest in the Steven Hunter industrial enterprises was taken care
of by a man who was as shrewd as Steve himself. Tom Butterworth, who had
made money and knew how to make and handle money, managed such things for
the inventor, and Steve's chance was gone forever.
That is, however, a part of the story of the development of the town of
Bidwell and a story that Steve never understood. When he overreached
himself that day he did not know what he had done. He made a deal with Hugh
and was happy to escape the predicament he thought he had got himself into
when he talked too much to the two men in the bank.
Although Steve's father had always a great faith in his son's shrewdness
and when he talked to other men represented him as a peculiarly capable and
unappreciated man, the two did not in private get on well. In the Hunter
household they quarreled and snarled at each other. Steve's mother had died
when he was a small boy and his one sister, two years older than himself,
kept herself always in the house and seldom appeared on the streets. She
was a semi-invalid. Some obscure nervous disease had twisted her body out
of shape, and her face twitched incessantly. One morning in the barn back
of the Hunter house Steve, then a lad of fourteen, was oiling his bicycle
when his sister appeared and stood watching him. A small wrench lay on the
ground and she picked it up. Suddenly and without warning she began to beat
him on the head. He was compelled to knock her down in order to tear the
wrench out of her hand. After the incident she was ill in bed for a month.
Elsie Hunter was always a source of unhappiness to her brother. As he began
to get up in life Steve had a growing passion for being respected by his
fellows. It got to be something of an obsession with him and among other
things he wanted very much to be thought of as one who had good blood in
his veins. A man whom he hired searched out his ancestry, and with the
exception of his immediate family it seemed very satisfactory. The sister,
with her twisted body and her face that twitched so persistently, seemed
to be everlastingly sneering at him. He grew half afraid to come into her
presence. After he began to grow rich he married Ernestine, the daughter of
the soap maker at Buffalo, and when her father died she also had a great
deal of money. His own father died and he set up a household of his own.
That was in the time when big houses began to appear at the edge of the
berry lands and on the hills south of Bidwell. On his father's death Steve
became guardian for his sister. The jeweler had left a small estate and it
was entirely in the son's hands. Elsie lived with one servant in a small
house in town and was put in the position of being entirely dependent on
her brother's bounty. In a sense it might be said that she lived by her
hatred of him. When on rare occasions he came to her house she would not
see him. A servant came to the door and reported her asleep. Almost every
month she wrote a letter demanding that her share of her father's money
be handed over to her, but it did no good. Steve occasionally spoke to an
acquaintance of his difficulty with her. "I am more sorry for the woman
than I can say," he declared. "It's the dream of my life to make the poor
afflicted soul happy. You see yourself that I provide her with every
comfort of life. Ours is an old family. I have it from an expert in such
matters that we are descendants of one Hunter, a courtier in the court of
Edward the Second of England. Our blood has perhaps become a little thin.
All the vitality of the family was centered in me. My sister does not
understand me and that has been the cause of much unhappiness and heart
burning, but I shall always do my duty by her."
In the late afternoon of the spring day that was also the most eventful day
of his life, Steve went quickly along the Wheeling Station platform to the
door of the telegraph office. It was a public place, but before going in
he stopped, again straightened his tie and brushed his clothes, and then
knocked at the door. As there was no response he opened the door softly
and looked in. Hugh was at his desk but did not look up. Steve went in and
closed the door. By chance the moment of his entrance was also a big moment
in the life of the man he had come to see. The mind of the young inventor,
that had for so long been dreamy and uncertain, had suddenly become
extraordinarily clear and free. One of the inspired moments that come to
intense natures, working intensely, had come to him. The mechanical problem
he was trying so hard to work out became clear. It was one of the moments
that Hugh afterwards thought of as justifying his existence, and in later
life he came to live for such moments. With a nod of his head to Steve he
arose and hurried out to the building that was used by the Wheeling as
a freight warehouse. The jeweler's son ran at his heels. On an elevated
platform before the freight warehouse sat an odd looking agricultural
implement, a machine for rooting potatoes out of the ground that had been
received on the day before and was now awaiting delivery to some farmer.
Hugh dropped to his knees beside the machine and examined it closely.
Muttered exclamations broke from his lips. For the first time in his life
he was not embarrassed in the presence of another person. The two men,
the one almost grotesquely tall, the other short of stature and already
inclined toward corpulency, stared at each other. "What is it you're
inventing? I came to see you about that," Steve said timidly.
Hugh did not answer the question directly. He stepped across the narrow
platform to the freight warehouse and began to make a rude drawing on the
side of the building. Then he tried to explain his plant-setting machine.
He spoke of it as a thing already achieved. At the moment he thought of it
in that way. "I had not thought of the use of a large wheel with the arms
attached at regular intervals," he said absent-mindedly. "I will have to
find money now. That'll be the next step. It will be necessary to make a
working model of the machine now. I must find out what changes I'll have to
make in my calculations."
The two men returned to the telegraph office and while Hugh listened Steve
made his proposal. Even then he did not understand what the machine that
was to be made was to do. It was enough for him that a machine was to be
made and he wanted to share in its ownership at once. As the two men walked
back from the freight warehouse, his mind took hold of Hugh's remark about
getting money. Again he was afraid. "There's some one in the background,"
he thought. "Now I must make a proposal he can't refuse. I mustn't leave
until I've made a deal with him."
Fairly carried away by his anxiety, Steve proposed to provide money out of
his own pocket to make the model of the machine. "We'll rent the old pickle
factory across the track," he said, opening the door and pointing with a
trembling finger. "I can get it cheap. I'll have windows and a floor put
in. Then I'll get you a man to whittle out a model of the machine. Allie
Mulberry can do it. I'll get him for you. He can whittle anything if you
only show him what you want. He's half crazy and won't get on to our
secret. When the model is made, leave it to me, you just leave it to me."
Rubbing his hands together Steve walked boldly to The telegrapher's desk
and picking up a sheet of paper began to write out a contract. It provided
that Hugh Was to get a royalty of ten per cent. of the selling price on the
machine he had invented and that was to be manufactured by a company to
be organized by Steven Hunter. The contract also stated that a promoting
company was to be organized at once and money provided for the experimental
work Hugh had yet to do. The Missourian was to begin getting a salary at
once. He was to risk nothing, as Steve elaborately explained. When he was
ready for them mechanics were to be employed and their salaries paid. When
the contract had been written and read aloud, a copy was made and Hugh, who
was again embarrassed beyond words, signed his name.
With a flourish of his hand Steve laid a little pile of money on the desk.
"That's for a starter," he said and turned to frown at George Pike who at
that moment came to the door. The freight agent went quickly away and the
two men were left alone together. Steve shook hands with his new partner.
He went out and then came in again. "You understand," he said mysteriously.
"The fifty dollars is your first month's salary. I was ready for you. I
brought it along. You just leave everything to me, just you leave it to
me." Again he went out and Hugh was left alone. He saw the young man go
across the tracks to the old factory and walk up and down before it. When a
farmer came along and shouted at him, he did not reply, but stepping back
into the road swept the deserted old building with his eyes as a general
might have looked over a battlefield. Then he went briskly down the road
toward town and the farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare after him.
Hugh McVey also stared. When Steve had gone away, he walked to the end
of the station platform and looked along the road toward town. It seemed
to him wonderful that he had at last held conversation with a citizen
of Bidwell. A little of the import of the contract he had signed came to
him, and he went into the station and got his copy of it and put it in his
pocket. Then he came out again. When he read it over and realized anew that
he was to be paid a living wage and have time and help to work out the
problem that had now become vastly important to his happiness, it seemed
to him that he had been in the presence of a kind of god. He remembered
the words of Sarah Shepard concerning the bright alert citizens of eastern
towns and realized that he had been in the presence of such a being, that
he had in some way become connected in his new work with such a one. The
realization overcame him completely. Forgetting entirely his duties as a
telegrapher, he closed the office and went for a walk across the meadows
and in the little patches of woodlands that still remained standing in the
open plain north of Pickleville. He did not return until late at night, and
when he did, had not solved the puzzle as to what had happened. All he got
out of it was the fact that the machine he had been trying to make was of
great and mysterious importance to the civilization into which he had come
to live and of which he wanted so keenly to be a part. There seemed to him
something almost sacred in that fact. A new determination to complete and
perfect his plant-setting machine had taken possession of him.
* * * * *
The meeting to organize a promotion company that would in turn launch the
first industrial enterprise in the town of Bidwell was held in the back
room of the Bidwell bank one afternoon in June. The berry season had just
come to an end and the streets were full of people. A circus had come to
town and at one o'clock there was a parade. Before the stores horses
belonging to visiting country people stood hitched in two long rows. The
meeting in the bank was not held until four o'clock, when the banking
business was at an end for the day. It had been a hot, stuffy afternoon
and a storm threatened. For some reason the whole town had an inkling of
the fact that a meeting was to be held on that day, and in spite of the
excitement caused by the coming of the circus, it was in everybody's mind.
From the very beginning of his upward journey in life, Steve Hunter had
the faculty of throwing an air of mystery and importance about everything
he did. Every one saw the workings of the machinery by which the myth
concerning himself was created, but was nevertheless impressed. Even the
men of Bidwell who retained the ability to laugh at Steve could not laugh
at the things he did.
For two months before the day on which the meeting was held, the town had
been on edge. Every one knew that Hugh McVey had suddenly given up his
place in the telegraph office and that he was engaged in some enterprise
with Steve Hunter. "Well, I see he has thrown off the mask, that fellow,"
said Alban Foster, superintendent of the Bidwell schools, in speaking of
the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, the minister of the Baptist
Church.
Steve saw to it that although every one was curious the curiosity was
unsatisfied. Even his father was left in the dark. The two men had a sharp
quarrel about the matter, but as Steve had three thousand dollars of his
own, left him by his mother, and was well past his twenty-first year, there
was nothing his father could do.
At Pickleville the windows and doors at the back of the deserted factory
were bricked up, and over the windows and the door at the front, where a
floor had been laid, iron bars specially made by Lew Twining the Bidwell
blacksmith had been put. The bars over the door locked the place at night
and gave the factory the air of a prison. Every evening before he went to
bed Steve walked to Pickleville. The sinister appearance of the building
at night gave him a peculiar satisfaction. "They'll find out what I'm up
to when I want 'em to," he said to himself. Allie Mulberry worked at the
factory during the day. Under Hugh's direction he whittled pieces of wood
into various shapes, but had no idea of what he was doing. No one but the
half-wit and Steve Hunter were admitted to the society of the telegraph
operator. When Allie Mulberry came into the Main Street at night, every
one stopped him and a thousand questions were asked, but he only shook his
head and smiled foolishly. On Sunday afternoons crowds of men and women
walked down Turner's Pike to Pickleville and stood looking at the deserted
building, but no one tried to enter. The bars were in place and window
shades were drawn over the windows. Above the door that faced the road
there was a large sign. "Keep Out. This Means You," the sign said.
The four men who met Steve in the bank knew vaguely that some sort of
invention was being perfected, but did not know what it was. They spoke
in an offhand way of the matter to their friends and that increased the
general curiosity. Every one tried to guess what was up. When Steve was not
about, John Clark and young Gordon Hart pretended to know everything but
gave the impression of men sworn to secrecy. The fact that Steve told them
nothing seemed to them a kind of insult. "The young upstart, I believe yet
he's a bluff," the banker declared to his friend, Tom Butterworth.
On Main Street the old and young men who stood about before the stores in
the evening tried also to make light of the jeweler's son and the air of
importance he constantly assumed. They also spoke of him as a young upstart
and a windbag, but after the beginning of his connection with Hugh McVey,
something of conviction went out of their voices. "I read in the paper that
a man in Toledo made thirty thousand dollars out of an invention. He got it
up in less than a day. He just thought of it. It's a new kind of way for
sealing fruit cans," a man in the crowd before Birdie Spink's drug store
absent-mindedly observed.
Inside the drug store by the empty stove, Judge Hanby talked persistently
of the time when factories would come. He seemed to those who listened a
sort of John the Baptist crying out of the coming of the new day. One
evening in May of that year, when a goodly crowd was assembled, Steve
Hunter came in and bought a cigar. Every one became silent. Birdie Spinks
was for some mysterious reason a little upset. In the store something
happened that, had there been some one there to record it, might later have
been remembered as the moment that marked the coming of the new age to
Bidwell. The druggist, after he had handed out the cigar, looked at the
young man whose name had so suddenly come upon every one's lips and whom he
had known from babyhood, and then addressed him as no young man of his age
had ever before been addressed by an older citizen of the town. "Well, good
evening, Mr. Hunter," he said respectfully. "And how do you find yourself
this evening?"
To the men who met him in the bank, Steve described the plant-setting
machine and the work it was intended to do. "It's the most perfect thing
of its kind I've ever seen," he said with the air of one who has spent
his life as an expert examiner of machinery. Then, to the amazement of
every one, he produced sheets covered with figures estimating the cost
of manufacturing the machine. To the men present it seemed as though the
question as to the practicability of the machine had already been settled.
The sheets covered with figures made the actual beginning of manufacturing
seem near at hand. Without raising his voice and quite as a matter of
course, Steve proposed that the men present subscribe each three thousand
dollars to the stock of a promotion company, the money to be used to
perfect the machine and put it actually to work in the fields, while a
larger company for the building of a factory was being organized. For the
three thousand dollars each of the men would receive later six thousand
dollars in stock in the larger company. They would make one hundred per
cent. on their first investment. As for himself he owned the invention and
it was very valuable. He had already received many offers from other men
in other places. He wanted to stick to his own town and to the men who had
known him since he was a boy. He would retain a controlling interest in the
larger company and that would enable him to take care of his friends. John
Clark he proposed to make treasurer of the promotion company. Every one
could see he would be the right man. Gordon Hart should be manager. Tom
Butterworth could, if he could find time to give it, help him in the actual
organization of the larger company. He did not propose to do anything in
a small way. Much stock would have to be sold to farmers, as well as to
townspeople, and he could see no reason why a certain commission for the
selling of stock should not be paid.
The four men came out of the back room of the bank just as the storm that
had all day been threatening broke on Main Street. They stood together by
the front window and watched the people skurry along past the stores
homeward-bound from the circus. Farmers jumping into their wagons started
their horses away on the trot. The whole street was populous with people
shouting and running. To an observing person standing at the bank window,
Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer a quiet town filled with people
who lived quiet lives and thought quiet thoughts, but a tiny section of
some giant modern city. The sky was extraordinarily black as from the smoke
of a mill. The hurrying people might have been workmen escaping from the
mill at the end of the day. Clouds of dust swept through the street. Steve
Hunter's imagination was aroused. For some reason the black clouds of dust
and the running people gave him a tremendous sense of power. It almost
seemed to him that he had filled the sky with clouds and that something
latent in him had startled the people. He was anxious to get away from
the men who had just agreed to join him in his first great industrial
adventure. He felt that they were after all mere puppets, creatures he
could use, men who were being swept along by him as the people running
along the streets were being swept along by the storm. He and the storm
were in a way akin to each other. He had an impulse to be alone with the
storm, to walk dignified and upright in the face of it as he felt that in
the future he would walk dignified and upright in the face of men.
Steve went out of the bank and into the street. The men inside shouted
at him, telling him he would get wet, but he paid no attention to their
warning. When he had gone and when his father had run quickly across the
street to his jewelry store, the three men who were left in the bank
looked at each other and laughed. Like the loiterers before Birdie Spinks'
drug-store, they wanted to belittle him and had an inclination to begin
calling him names; but for some reason they could not do it. Something had
happened to them. They looked at each other with a question in their eyes.
Each man waited for the others to speak. "Well, whatever happens we can't
lose much of anything," John Clark finally observed.
And over the bridge and out into Turner's Pike walked Steve Hunter, the
embryo industrial magnate. Across the great stretches of fields that lay
beside the road the wind ran furiously, tearing leaves off trees, carrying
great volumes of dust before it. The hurrying black clouds in the sky were,
he fancied, like clouds of smoke pouring out of the chimneys of factories
owned by himself. In fancy also he saw his town become a city, bathed in
the smoke of his enterprises. As he looked abroad over the fields swept by
the storm of wind, he realized that the road along which he walked would in
time become a city street. "Pretty soon I'll get an option on this land,"
he said meditatively. An exalted mood took possession of him and when
he got to Pickleville he did not go into the shop where Hugh and Allie
Mulberry were at work, but turning, walked back toward town in the mud and
the driving rain.
It was a time when Steve wanted to be by himself, to feel himself the one
great man of the community. He had intended to go into the old pickle
factory and escape the rain, but when he got to the railroad tracks, had
turned back because he realized suddenly that in the presence of the
silent, intent inventor he had never been able to feel big. He wanted to
feel big on that evening and so, unmindful of the rain and of his hat,
that was caught up by the wind and blown away into a field, he went along
the deserted road thinking great thoughts. At a place where there were no
houses he stopped for a moment and lifted his tiny hands to the skies. "I'm
a man. I tell you what, I'm a man. Whatever any one says, I tell you what,
I'm a man," he shouted into the void.
CHAPTER VII
Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have
come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They
live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates,
and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant
toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls the mice scamper about
in droves, and there is much squealing and chattering. Now and then a bold
mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he
will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built
the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall
live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one
shall go hungry."
The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses,
squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and
depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields,
but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in
droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness
of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. When the children
fight and scream in the houses and in the streets, the dark spaces between
the walls rumble with strange and appalling noises.
The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment
escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light comes
into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up stories
about them. "The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of days over
the tops of trees," he says and looks quickly about to see if he has been
heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he runs away with
a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other mice are repeating
his saying and getting some little comfort from it, he and the female mouse
find a warm dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that
mice continue to be born to dwell within the walls of the houses.
When the first small model of Hugh McVey's plant-setting machine had been
whittled out by the half-wit Allie Mulberry, it replaced the famous ship,
floating in the bottle, that for two or three years had been lying in the
window of Hunter's jewelry store. Allie was inordinately proud of the new
specimen of his handiwork. As he worked under Hugh's directions at a bench
in a corner of the deserted pickle factory, he was like a strange dog that
has at last found a master. He paid no attention to Steve Hunter who, with
the air of one bearing in his breast some gigantic secret, came in and
went out at the door twenty times a day, but kept his eyes on the silent
Hugh who sat at a desk and made drawings on sheets of paper. Allie tried
valiantly to follow the instructions given him and to understand what his
master was trying to do, and Hugh, finding himself unembarrassed by the
presence of the half-wit, sometimes spent hours trying to explain the
workings of some intricate part of the proposed machine. Hugh made each
part crudely out of great pieces of board and Allie reproduced the part in
miniature. Intelligence began to come into the eyes of the man who all his
life had whittled meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach
stones, and ships intended to float in bottles. Love and understanding
began a little to do for him what words could not have done. One day when a
part Hugh had fashioned would not work the half-wit himself made the model
of a part that worked perfectly. When Hugh incorporated it in the machine,
he was so happy that he could not sit still, and walked up and down cooing
with delight.
When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of
excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared himself
either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties
were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of the invention, and
in the nature of things could not have, were ready to fight any one who
dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who drove into town to see
the new wonder were many who said the machine would not, could not, work.
"It isn't practical," they said. Going off by themselves and forming
groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred objections sprang to their lips.
"See all the little wheels and cogs the thing has," they said. "You see
it won't work. You take now in a field where there are stones and old
tree roots, maybe, sticking in the ground. There you'll see. Fools'll buy
the machine, yes. They'll spend their money. They'll put in plants. The
plants'll die. The money'll be wasted. There'll be no crop." Old men, who
had been cabbage farmers in the country north of Bidwell all their lives,
and whose bodies were all twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of
the cabbage fields, came hobbling into town to look at the model of the
new machine. Their opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the
carpenter, the artisan, the doctor--by all the townspeople. Almost without
exception, they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before
the jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the
crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. "Huh," they
exclaimed, "a thing of wheels and cogs, eh? Well, so young Hunter expects
that thing to take the place of a man. He's a fool. I always said that boy
was a fool." The merchants and townspeople, their ardor a little dampened
by the adverse decision of the men who knew plant-setting, went off by
themselves. They went into Birdie Spinks' drugstore, but did not listen
to the talk of Judge Hanby. "If the machine works, the town'll wake up,"
some one declared. "It means factories, new people coming in, houses to
be built, goods to be bought." Visions of suddenly acquired wealth began
to float in their minds. Young Ed Hall, apprentice to Ben Peeler the
carpenter, grew angry. "Hell," he exclaimed, "why listen to a lot of damned
old calamity howlers? It's the town's duty to get out and plug for that
machine. We got to wake up here. We got to forget what we used to think
about Steve Hunter. Anyway, he saw a chance, didn't he? and he took it.
I wish I was him. I only wish I was him. And what about that fellow we
thought was maybe just a telegraph operator? He fooled us all slick, now
didn't he? I tell you we ought to be proud to have such men as him and